A Modern Avatar
by Wyrmhero
Summary: One hundred and fifty years, and the Avatar Cycle moves on. But with seventeen years gone now since Avatar Korra's death with no new Avatar revealed to the masses, some now believe that the purpose of the Avatar is no more; that bending will fall into decline thanks to technology; that the world has moved on. But the Avatar is the Soul of the World, and the world needs its soul.


_Essay on the Higher Forms of Bending_

_Fire, water, air, earth. _

_These are the four basic bending disciplines that, along with the discovery of the manipulation of lightning, blood and metal, make up the spiritual world. Only the Avatar can master more than one discipline, and is they who are bridge between that world and the physical one. Being an Avatar has not shown itself to give the ability to use a higher form of bending, though._

_Over two hundred years ago, metal and bloodbending weren't even discovered. Lightningbending was restricted to only powerful firebenders, mostly of the royal family at the time, and bloodbending could only be done during a full moon._

_That's changed over time. It's still unknown as to why, but these other types of bending have become more and more commonplace, and those benders aren't always stronger than others. Despite this, bloodbending is still seen as a taboo ability, and anyone who uses it risked having their bending completely removed by the Avatar._

_The most controversial of these is obviously bloodbending, and the ability to control another being. With the death of Avatar Korra and the apparent loss of the Avatar cycle completely, bloodbending has become the tool of organised crime, and anyone who uses bloodbending on another human faces the death penalty. Similarly, using it on an animal carries charges of cruelty, and is severely punished._

_Lightningbending, on the other hand, is often used in old power plants and factories, because it apparently contradicts the law of conservation of energy. While our energy demands were low, we could use a team of lightningbenders to power generators, which in turn powered cities. With the advances in energy science, and the increasing amounts of technology in our homes, we moved away from costly manual labour to create energy, and instead moved to comparably cheap renewable sources of energy, such as tidal, wind and solar. These had the benefit of being able to be run all day, and not requiring shifts of constantly mobile workers. Because of this, lightningbending is no longer an extremely desirable form to be able to use, as it is seen as having little use beside that._

_The final form of higher bending, metalbending, is popular amongst hobbyists and the police, for its ability to move metal with precision and, if needed, speed, making it a useful form to be able to use to get between two places. Engineers also use metalbending to create prototype parts, though finalised parts are created by machinery. It is also in decline professionally due to anti-bending-discrimination laws._

_It is also speculated that there is a higher form of airbending, but no-one knows what it might be. The line of Avatar Aang has not displayed any new developments along these lines, and as there are barely over a hundred airbenders in the world, it may be some time before that is discovered and developed. It is possible that any chance of discovering what some theorise as 'spacebending' died with the Air Nomads during the Hundred Year War._

I stopped typing and sighed. This essay was all over the place. 'Look at the first line. It reads like something out of those ancient plays!' I thought._ '_Why did I even write that introduction? Everyone knows how bending worked.' It was, after all, as inescapable as it was pointless nowadays. I dragged the mousebear across the screen, highlighted all of what I had typed, and hit the delete button.

'Whatever help you can give would be appreciated,' I thought inwardly. I looked at the cold cup of tea that sat on the desk beside me, and wished I didn't have to do this. Why was history such a pain?

_Higher forms of bending were first developed during the end of the Hundred Year War, thanks to desperation on the part of Toph Bei Fong, the first metalbender, and an unknown waterbender who was a prisoner of the Fire Nation and used bloodbending to escape. Lightningbending was a form that was only usable at the time by the descendants of Fire Lord Sozin, who developed it during the first known arc of Sozin's Comet, and used it to destroy the Air Nomads._

No. The latter was less history, and more of a guess. Wouldn't be getting any marks for that. Sozin was the first recorded lightningbender, but that didn't mean he used it in the wars at that time. I erased it all and sighed. I drank some of my tea. I started again.

It was going to be a long night...

* * *

Well, this is my first foray into writing fanfiction for quite some time now. Korra did something that very few fantasy series ever do: It advanced technologically. This idea has always been something that interested me - I've also read the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson, who puts metal-granted superpowers and senses into colonial-era America. So, the question I thought for Avatar was this: As technology developed, what would happen to the next Avatar? How would they deal with the new reality? Take our world, for instance. Within the last 100 years, we've developed easy travel through the air; we've created computers, which allow everyone the entire knowledge of the world for their own personal use; socially, we've developed stages of our lives - The idea of 'teenagers' was only really developed after the Second World War. So the question I came across more and more in any information-era fantasy was this: Why would magic matter any more? And so, we started off with a piece of homework, and gets some exposition across.

Standard disclaimers apply.


End file.
